Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Recently I saw a video on YouTube
that shows kittens and dogs meeting for the first time.

The video is incredibly sweet,
and watching these natural enemies play together made me think that humans are
bringing about an incredible new thing on this planet: interspecies love and
affection. Without the influence of humans, these cats and dogs would never be
snuggling together for naps or playing games.

Anyone who has ever owned a pet
knows that animals are loving, caring, loyal, trusting, and forgiving. But in
the wild, animals can usually only share this love with members of their own
species. There
are the rare examples of animals caring for members of another species in
the wild, but from what I can find these are usually cases where a mother has
adopted an infant.

But when animals get
domesticated, because they no longer have to worry about survival, particularly
obtaining food, they are freed up to express empathy and take care of other
animals. This
article gives examples of some unlikely pairings, including an orangutan
caring for tiger cubs, a male pig with a lamb, and a chihuahua with a marmoset
(great pictures at the website). The book Unlikely Friendships, by National
Geographic magazine writer Jennifer Holland, documents 47 stories of
interspecies relationship, including the Biblical lion lying down with the
lamb: a
female lion adopted a baby antelope at a nature reserve in Kenya.

Monday, December 29, 2014

I have heard it said this is a
difficult book, and I disagree—I found it a pleasure to read. Piketty is a good
writer and explains economic terms and concepts very clearly. The only thing
required of a reader is the patience to read page after page of descriptions of
wealth in various times. I have no training in economics, so if you want an economist’s
review of this book, check out Paul Krugman’s review in the New York Review of Books. However, I
have become more and more convinced of the importance of economics in politics
and history, so I have attempted to educate myself. This then is the impression
of Capital by a semi-educated layperson.

Piketty has analyzed an
unprecedented amount of data on wealth and has come to the conclusion that
there is a fundamental mathematical equation that not only explains income and
wealth inequality, but also explains why it will always tend to increase and
concentrate over time.

This equation is r >
g, where r stands for rate of return on capital and g stands for growth of the
overall economy. For most of the period for which there are statistics (beginning
about 1800), r has been greater than g, and this means capital increases
seemingly without limit during these periods.

Much of the 20th
century was an anomaly because of the two world wars and the Great Depression. First,
these events destroyed vast amounts of wealth, particularly in Europe. Second,
they also impacted the values of r and g. The US and Britain pioneered the
concept of confiscatory taxes at the highest income levels—up to 90%, which
reduced r, the rate of return on capital. In addition, there was a great deal
of rebuilding to be done in Europe, an arms race in the US to finance, and an
explosion of consumer products for the new middle-class to purchase (telephone,
radio, washing machine, refrigerator, car, television, computer), which greatly
inflated g, the growth rate. For a few decades after 1950 the basic equation of
capitalism was reversed—g was greater than r. This automatically lowered income
inequality, and created the false impression that capitalism had been tamed and
wealth inequality was a relic of the past.

Monday, December 22, 2014

On this first day of the year that is longer (the day after the
winter solstice), I’m thinking of time. Recently I heard of an idea for a
living clock. Carolus
Linnaeus (1707-1778), the biologist who developed the two-word naming system
for biology, noticed that plants opened and closed their flowers at predictable
times during the day and night. In other words, plants, like animals, have
internal biological clocks.

For
example, Goat’s Beard (Tragopogon pratensis)
flowers open at 3 am, while Dandelion (Taraxacum
officinale) flowers open at 5 am. Linnaeus realized that you could tell
time by looking at which plants’ flowers were open. After researching and
planting a wide variety of plants, he was able to tell time to within a half
hour, just by observing his flowers. Linnaeus drew a diagram of a plant clock,
but it appears he never actually planted one.

I think this would be a lot of fun to try. This
article has a diagram with plants that grow here in North America, like
morning glories (open at 10 am) and California poppy (open at 1 pm). This article
has information about making your own garden, as does this,
and both have a list of many plants and their flowering time.

I haven’t been able to find photos of anyone who has
successfully planted a living clock, so if you know of any please let me know!
Supposedly there is one at the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, where Linnaeus
lived, but I haven’t been able to find photos of it. They do have a “Linnaeus garden” in their
botanical gardens.

Monday, December 15, 2014

What is reality? Is the physical
reality we see around us all there is?

Most scientists insist that
there is nothing but the physical, material universe. They reject any talk of a
reality that can’t be measured empirically with scientific instruments. If it
can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.

Lately it has become popular in
science to talk of a multi-dimensional reality beyond the four-dimensional
universe (space plus time) we’re all familiar with. For example, string theory,
a branch of physics, posits ten or eleven dimensions of spacetime (or
twenty-six or…). The books I’ve read about string theory (The Hidden Reality and Hyperspace)
explain that the reason we can’t perceive these other dimensions of reality is
because they are really really small—the theory says these other dimensions
must be “curled up” into some tiny space smaller than our measuring devices can
detect. (See this Nova
article or this
short essay by the author of Hyperspace, Dr. Michio Kaku)

People who are spiritually
inclined talk about angels or higher beings that exist on another plane of
existence. Others talk about higher levels or dimensions of consciousness.
There seems to be a common attitude among spiritual seekers that the physical
reality we live in is an illusion or dream, and that the spiritual realm or
higher dimensions are reality.

I think these views about
reality are mistaken, and there’s a fabulous allegory called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensionsthat explains why
I believe this. Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, is a short novel published in
1884. Mr. Abbott provides a very useful way to imagine how other dimensions can
exist by creating a two-dimensional society called “Flatland.” [Read the full book online, see Carl Sagan discuss it.]

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

I love roller coasters. When I
go to an amusement park the roller coaster is usually the only ride that
interests me. Many years ago, I went with my stepdaughter to Opryland, a park
near Nashville, and a big thunderstorm came through. We decided to stay at the
park and wait out the storm. Almost everyone else left so, once the storm was
over, we had the unusual experience of having an amusement park to ourselves.
My stepdaughter liked a ride with twirling swings that wasn’t too far from the
roller coaster, so I left her there—she never even had to get off the swing
between rides—and headed over to my favorite. This was a corkscrew coaster,
meaning you spent time upside down. I rode it six times in a row with no
waiting; what a fabulous experience!

Why are roller coasters and
other extreme rides at amusement parks and fairs so popular? Why do we pay to
be scared? Clearly many of us like to experience the simulation of approaching death.
Why is this, when our whole animal nature is programmed to survive at all costs?

The message of my husband and my
book, The
Game of God, (newly revised), is that one reason the universe exists is
to allow unlimited God to experience the roller coaster of life, the ups and
downs of limited existence, which eminently includes life and death. In the
first chapter (read
it here, complete with cartoons) Arthur and I imagine someone who “has it
all,” who is rich, beautiful, and powerful beyond measure, who has no problems,
who is perfectly healthy, and best of all is immortal. That is, someone who is
as close to being unlimited as possible. We ask, “Would there be any experiences this person would
miss?”

We conclude there would be
plenty of missed experiences: from adventure to learning, from falling in love
to anticipation of something new, from struggle to triumph, from fear of dying
to the joy of aliveness. Even riding a roller coaster would lose its excitement
if there were no possibility of risk:

Cartoon by Arthur Hancock, from The Game of God

Recently I saw an old Twilight
Zone episode called “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This is from a short story by Ambrose
Pierce set during the U.S. Civil War. The TV episode begins with a group of
soldiers preparing to hang a man from a bridge. The soldiers pull the board
that is holding him up out from under his feet, but the rope around his neck breaks
and he is free! He stays under water as the current of the creek carries him
away out of range of the soldiers’ rifles. Once he’s out of sight he climbs up
onto the bank and you can see he feels profoundly alive; he appreciates the
simplest things: breathing, smelling flowers, and the song of birds. Only at
the end do you realize that the rope didn’t break; he did die. The “escape” was
a fantasy that happened in the few seconds between the platform being removed
and his death. But in those seconds he lived.

Somewhere I heard a story about
Civil War veterans that also illustrates this idea that the edge of death
brings about a passionate experience of life (maybe it was from Ken Burns’ “The
Civil War”?). These veterans were imagining heaven, and this was their
conception: every day they would fight a battle, then every evening every
soldier—including those who had “died”—would gather and tell stories around the
campfire. On the surface this seems completely bizarre—who would want to
recreate brutal, bloody battles in heaven? But once you see the link between
risk-of-death and the buzzing energy of aliveness, their fantasy makes sense.
For these men, the most alive they ever felt was on the battlefield.

This wisdom is embedded in many
spiritual traditions. For example, the Tao te Ching teaches that we live in a
dualistic universe of opposites, and that pairs of opposites arise together,
they are linked. We begin the first chapter of The Game of God with a quote
from the Tao:

Under heaven all can see beauty as
beauty

only because there is
ugliness.

All can know good as good only because there
is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise
together.

Difficult and easy compliment each
other.

Long and short contrast each other;

High and low rest upon each other;

Voice and sound harmonize each other;

Front and back follow one another.

Cartoon by Arthur Hancock, from The Game of God

There is a Zen story that answers
the question “What
is Zen?” (see below): A man is in a jungle. A tiger spots him and chases him to a cliff.
The man lowers himself down on a vine until he hears another tiger below. As
he’s hanging there, with death above and below, two mice, a black one and a
white one, start chewing on his vine. Facing certain death, he notices a wild
strawberry plant near him and, plucking a berry and eating it, says, “How
sweet.” In other words, the message of Zen is: experience every moment fully
because death is always lurking.

Don Juan Matus, the Yaqui Indian
shaman in the Carlos Castaneda series, taught Carlos that he should make
friends with his death.

When we deny death, ironically
we deny life. We end up taking life for granted. We don’t see the perfection in
every moment. We think of death as the worst thing that can happen to us, yet
it makes life meaningful.

The Game of God presents the theory that the first purpose of the
universe is to allow unlimited God the experience of limitation—life and death,
beginning and end, fear and hate, happiness and sorrow, ignorance and learning.

In order to have a realistic
experience of limitation, God must forget that She-He-It is God. In other
words, the universe is God…in a state
of amnesia.

The universe is a game in which
God forgets His-Her-Its identity and, in the process of playing, remembers who
She-He-It is.

Evolution is the process of God
awakening from amnesia into the remembrance of His-Her-Its true identity.

The universe is literally An
Expression Of God In Amnesia (AEOGIA). And God likes roller coasters!

Monday, December 1, 2014

In 2007 my
family gathered to celebrate my 50th birthday. My nieces were aged 4
and 5. I bought them some inexpensive digital cameras thinking it would be fun
to see what kind of images they would create.

Unfortunately the cameras didn’t
take very good photos and it looks like we deleted most of them. But it was
really interesting looking at their photos at the time, and I did save a
couple:

I was reminded of these photos
by an article in The New Yorker about
the GoPro camera, “We
Are a Camera,” by Nick Paumgarten. The GoPro is a small HD video
camera with different mounts that can be affixed to all kinds of sporting
equipment. Mr. Paumgarten says an interesting feature of this camera is that

because it primarily points
outward it’s a record of what an experience looks like…The result is not so
much a selfie as a worldie. It’s more like the story you’d tell about an
adventure than the photo that would accompany it.

The author’s son won a GoPro in
a school raffle, and

On a ski vacation that spring,
he affixed it to the top of his helmet…Even though the camera was turned
outward, filled mainly by the sight of the terrain sliding past, it provided,
more than anything, a glimpse into the mind of a dreamy and quiet boy…I didn’t
need a camera to show me what he looked like to the world, but was delighted to
find one that could show me what the world looked like to him. It captured him
better than any camera pointed at him could. This was a proxy, of sorts.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Most people see suffering in a completely
negative light. And this is not just on the physical level, but the spiritual
level also. For example, the Buddha’s Four
Noble Truths are usually interpreted as a way to end suffering. In other
words, there are no positive aspects to suffering.

I have a different take: I think suffering is
one of the best impetuses for growth and learning. Here's a song my husband Arthur
wrote about the value of suffering—he calls suffering "the guru."

Stop signs and stoplights are red because human
perception is keenly attuned to the color red; our blood is colored red and our
physical survival depends upon us being aware when we've hurt ourselves.
Physical pain exists, at least in part, to draw our attention to the fact that
we are ill or injured. Most of us resist physical pain; we reach for pills to
make it go away; we see pain as an enemy. But when you look at it from the perspective
of “suffering is the guru” you see that pain is our ally, it draws our
attention to a problem that needs fixing. The pain is the motivator for us to
stop a behavior that's hurting us, to go to the doctor, etc.

Problems of the mind don't have an obvious
physical symptom like a bleeding wound or the pain of a burn. But the
sufferings of ego-identity—pride, embarrassment, anxiety, regret, remorse, depression—are
the analogues of physical pain. The suffering is pointing towards the problem,
in the same way a pain in my mouth points to a problem with my gums/teeth and
sends me to the dentist. The depression or anxiety is our ally, our teacher,
our guru, pointing our attention to a sore in our mind that is in need of
healing.

Monday, November 10, 2014

I’m a weaver, and I belong to a
weaver’s group that meets monthly. We regularly joke about how weaving is a
good occupation for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder because it
requires attention to detail and the ability to spend hours at a stretch doing repetitive
tasks. For example, I’ve just finished a piece that had 1296 threads: first I
had to measure out 9-yard lengths of yarn 1296 times, then each of those
threads had to be threaded through the loom twice.
And this was before I could start to weave! Often people ask me how I have the
patience to do this—for pleasure—and I reply that I love to weave and this is
just part of the process. But I can also see how I have the kind of personality
that permits this type of detail work.

At our last meeting one of the
weavers said, “Don’t cure the neurosis, find the right job for it!” This struck
me as a profound insight, particularly for our society that is anxious to cure
every slight deviation from some concept of “normal” that we’ve established.
I’d just amend it to say, “or the right lifestyle.”

Twenty-five years ago I taught
art at a private grade school. There was a boy with ADHD in first grade. This
was the first time I had encountered someone with the diagnosis. His teacher
was very wise; she let the boy sit on the floor and play with blocks during
lessons while all the other students had to sit at their desks. By doing this,
he could listen and attend to what she was saying, but if he’d been forced to
sit at his desk he’d have been incapable of paying attention. What impressed me
most of all was that she’d managed to explain it to the other kids so they were
all okay with the setup. I loved this boy and had a great relationship with
him; he was quite perceptive and intelligent.

What I learned from this
experience was that maybe it’s incorrect to say there is something wrong with many
of the children with ADHD. Maybe there’s something wrong with our cultural
norms. Maybe the way school is structured is just not right for some children,
for example. This perception has just been strengthened as ADHD has become an
epidemic. How could there be something wrong with that many of our children?

Last week the New York Times published an article by Richard A.
Friedman, “A Natural Fix for A.D.H.D.” Dr.
Friedman is professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology
clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College. His article suggests that my
perception may be true.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

This morning, as the Republicans
are celebrating nationwide victories, taking control of the Senate and
increasing their majority in the House, plus winning governor’s races in
supposedly liberal states, I’m reminded of the widespread liberal delusion last
year that the Republican Party was an almost-extinct dinosaur (see this blog post).

My impression is that the
American people are deeply confused. They say they’re angry about a do-nothing
Congress and then vote for the obstructionists. They say they hate government
yet demand services when it’s in their interest—when a natural disaster hits a
conservative part of the country there’s never a mention of refusing federal
aid because it’s from that loathsome government.

The reason we’re confused is
because we’ve lost any compelling story about who we are as a people. We used
to have a thrilling story, one that made me proud to be an American when I was
a child. We had thrown off a king and instituted a republic where we governed
ourselves. We were the vanguard of human progress.

Of course there were plenty of
issues with the original constitution: slavery and a limited electorate are the
obvious examples. But as time went on and we continued on the path of
democratization, we fixed those errors. We first expanded the electorate to all
white men in the 1820s, ended slavery in 1865, women finally got the vote in 1920,
and over the last fifty years we’ve been expanding civil rights.

But today we seem to be missing
the awesomeness of what we have accomplished. We don’t understand the amazing
advance in human social organization that democracy represents. We are so spoiled by the relative ease
of living and our deplorable lack of historical knowledge that we are unaware
of not only the preciousness—and precariousness—of our democracy but the great
struggles that were required to wrest control from tyrants. We take our
democratic republic for granted. And that’s why we are in danger of losing it.

Friday, October 31, 2014

This month I had a colonoscopy for the first time. I’d heard
people talk about the pre-procedure cleaning, and how that was the hardest
part. I read online about the drink that you take to empty your bowels, and how
awful it tasted.

So I approached the cleansing day with some trepidation. My
experience? It was easy. The drink tastes a little salty, that’s all, and if
you’re prepared and spend the evening near a bathroom, the cleansing is a minor
inconvenience, even funny if you take the right attitude.

The next day, while we were waiting for the doctor to come
into the room, I told the nurse-anesthesiologist that, in my opinion, the
cleansing experience was minor and that people were whiners. She replied
“YES!!”

Afterwards I thought about it this way: modern science has
developed a technology that can reduce the incidence of colon cancer (a very
nasty and painful disease) to almost zero, and our part in the equation is to spend
a few hours going to the toilet every fifteen minutes. But what part do most of
us put our attention on? The small amount of discomfort. We whine about how
much we suffered.

Because of my GLACHH (gratitude, love, acceptance,
compassion, humility, honesty--see blog post) work, I was instead capable of putting my
attention on the amazing gift to my health the colonoscopy represented. I could
feel gratitude.

Everything is a mix of good
and bad. In this dualistic world there is no free lunch, there is nothing that
is all positive. In this country we have become so spoiled by the good life
that we seem to be expecting life to have no down sides.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

There’s something new happening in the world of acoustic
music. Last weekend I went to see Noam Pikelny and Stuart
Duncan—a duo of banjo and fiddle. When I first heard about the concert, I
wondered how those two instruments could possibly make for an interesting
evening of music. But recently I’ve been listening to a lot of music on YouTube
with Chris Thile, Michael
Daves, Brian Sutton, Noam Pikelny, and others, and these musicians are
playing together in all sorts of combinations.

Chris Thile has been pushing the boundaries of musical
categories for some years now, ever since he left Nickel Creek. You never know
where he’ll turn up and what kind of music he’ll be playing; right now he’s
touring with Edgar Meyer—that’s a duo of mandolin and acoustic bass. Their song,
“Big Top” doesn’t fit
any music genre I know—jazz bluegrass would be about the closest you could come
to a category. He’s also playing Bach sonatas on his
mandolin. Maybe we’re almost to the point where we can throw the concept of
genre out the window: it doesn’t matter any more what instrument you play, you
can create music in any style you like or create a new one of your own. It
feels so free and fresh.

In the concert I heard, Mr. Pikelny and Mr. Duncan played
bluegrass, but they also played a Scottish reel, Django Reinhardt-style swing,
and some haunting waltzes of Mr. Pikelny's composition. The instrumentation was sensational; they are both masters on
their instruments (Mr. Pikelny just won banjo player of the year from the
International Bluegrass Music Association). Sometimes I shook my head in wonder
at the amazing runs Mr. Pikelny did on his banjo. And there was something
wonderful in just having the two instruments; instead of a band passing the solo
lead from instrument to instrument while everyone else plays rhythm, there were
a lot of times when both men were playing lead at the same time and it was marvelous.

Do yourself a favor and click on some of these links and
start exploring this new world of music!

Update: Thanks to my friend Arthur for reminding me to say
that both these men are also in bands: Mr. Pikelny is in the Punch Brothers and
Mr. Duncan is in the Nashville Bluegrass Band.

Also, I did not watch the tour video I linked to above until
after I wrote this post. When I did watch it (linked again here), it was interesting that the men
brought up two points I’d mentioned.

could these two instruments fill an evening?

with only two instruments there’s “no place to
hide.” No playing background rhythm.

Another feature of this music is that the musicians often share a single microphone, creating an acoustic, “living room” feel.
Instead of having separate microphones and listening to a tailored mix through
earbuds (each person has a mix with their instrument/voice a little higher),
these musicians are listening to each other acoustically. This creates a
realness that is lost in all the electronics. Mr. Pikelny and Duncan had
individual mics, but there were no floor monitors or earpieces.

Another group that plays this way sometimes is the Milkcarton Kids. When I saw them
earlier this year they used only one microphone, and faced each other. It was
as if we in the audience were sharing an intimate musical experience that the
two men were creating together. Exquisite.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Last week Ebola made it to the United States. It was only a
matter of time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts a
“worst-case scenario” of 1.4 million cases (worldwide total) by early
2015.

Other Ebola outbreaks have happened in rural villages and
were relatively easy to contain. But this day was inexorably coming when an
outbreak would spread into urban areas, making it much more difficult to
contain. So why wasn’t there a UN plan in place for exactly this kind of
situation, with mobile hospitals and protective suits ready to deploy? There
doesn’t seem to have been any contingency plans ready to handle a health
emergency of this scope. So far most of the foreign aid workers are nonprofit
groups like Doctors without Borders, and these people must be getting
exhausted. The U.S. is deploying 3000 troops to Liberia, but this effort will
take weeks or months before making any difference.

In my mind this event has exposed the fundamental weakness
of our current global governing systems. The world is interconnected now. More
and more problems are global. We can’t say any longer that, for example, this
Ebola outbreak is just West Africa’s problem. It’s our problem too. One person
gets on a plane and the virus is here.

And Ebola is just one example. Climate change is another. Syria
is another. Allowing the Syrian civil war to fester allowed ISIS to gain power.

My husband tells a great fable: Imagine a rubber lifeboat,
afloat in the middle of a vast ocean. The boat is filled with passengers, each
one representing a nation of Earth. The boat’s rule is that each passenger has
the sovereign right to do whatever he/she likes in his/her seat. If a passenger
wants to take out an ice pick and start poking holes in the boat, that’s her
right. But everyone in the boat—that’s all of us—will go down together.

We live on a
small planet in a sea of darkness. We better learn to start thinking of
ourselves as the same people, as citizens not of the United States or of
Liberia but as citizens of Earth, recognizing that my interests are yours and
vice versa. If I hurt you I hurt myself. We’re that connected now.

It’s time we developed a global governing system with true
power. The UN was a good beginning, but it was deliberately made weak so it
couldn’t interfere with the business of most nation-states. We need a real
world government.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Three years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement got
America’s attention with the cry of “We are the 99%.” Income inequality was put
under a spotlight for a time. But how far did the understanding penetrate?
Unfortunately, not very far.

First, in a recent poll the average American thought CEOs
made 30 times the wage of their employees, which hasn’t been true for 50 years.
Today the figure is ten times as much—over 300 times.

Second, most
people are completely unaware of the extent of wealth inequality, which is
much worse than income inequality. The wealthiest 20% in the U.S. own about 84% of the wealth.
Think about that for a moment: only 16% of wealth is left for over three-quarters of the population. When
you get to the bottom half of the
population, those 155 million people own only about 2% of the total wealth.

To see an illustration of the income and wealth inequality
in the United States, watch this episode
of a TV show I did with Arthur Hancock in 2010.

The chart above, created by Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College, vividly
shows one of the contributors to the rise of income inequality in the last few
decades. The graph portrays the distribution of national income growth during
economic expansions since WWII. The blue represents the bottom 90%, the red the top 10%. In the last thirty years all the gains have
gone to the wealthy, in fact, in the latest expansion most Americans have been
losers—the truth is most of us don’t even realize we’re in an expansion, the
Great Recession hasn’t ended for us yet.

So how can people be unaware of this development [massive income
inequality], or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is
that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never
see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids
driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by
helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of
our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds…

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it
matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more
about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it
is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the
Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly
burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that
you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are
far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10
percent receive almost half of all income and own 75
percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less
disproportionate…

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of
ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

And the wealthy, in control of the media and the government,
have a vested interest in keeping us ignorant.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Recently I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a
story of three men prospecting for gold in the mountains of Mexico. It’s a tale
of greed; how the lust for money corrupts the human heart. All of the men are
affected to some degree, and the character played by Humphrey Bogart is driven
insane by the power of his greed. In the end it kills him.

I related this to a friend of
mine who is a devotee of a guru in India. She said, “My guru tells a story of
greed too!”

A yogi went into the woods to find a cave to live in. At the
same time, a group of four thieves were walking through the woods on their way
to find something to rob. The yogi went into a cave, and just as the thieves
passed by came running out, yelling “There’s a killer in there!” The thieves
were intrigued and entered the cave. There they found a pile of treasure. Each
of the four immediately started plotting how to get all the treasure for himself.
The two senior members sent the younger ones off for a cart to haul the loot,
and then lay in ambush and killed them on their return…

My friend couldn’t remember all the
details, but the end result was all four of the thieves lay dead. The treasure
was indeed a killer.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Recently I watched the film “V for Vendetta.” The movie is set in an authoritarian future, and dangerous books
and artwork have long ago been eliminated from people’s lives. But V, the hero who
is resisting the authoritarians, has an underground home filled with books and
art that he has “rescued” from the censors’ vaults. Seeing the books piled high
in one of the rooms, I was reminded of the importance of hard copies.

When information is digital,
access to it can be taken away very easily. For example, if you own an
e-reader, you don’t really own the books on it. The Kindle
Store user agreement makes that very clear: “Kindle Content is licensed,
not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”Amazon can remove a book from your device at any time.

Ironically, the premier example
of this so far are some George Orwell books. The person who uploaded them for
sale on Amazon did not own the copyright. When Amazon realized the error in
2009, those books just disappeared from the Kindles of the people who thought
they’d purchased the books. And there was no notice or explanation from Amazon.

Maybe this seems insignificant
now, but if at some future point we have an authoritarian government, any books
that that government disliked could be disappeared at the stroke of a button.
It’s not so easy to collect and burn every book.

I like reading on my Kindle; I
like the convenience of looking up words and making notes onscreen. It’s nice
being able to pack just one small device that holds multiple books when I
travel. It’s nice not having to dust more books on my bookshelves. Yet understanding
the importance of hard copies makes me resolve to keep buying physical books.

This Mark
Fiore cartoon illustrates the importance of another object that is
being made obsolete by our new devices: printed maps. Who needs to worry about
carrying maps when you can just use your GPS or pull up the map on your phone?
But devices and Internet connections fail, and if you’re out in the wilderness
that failure can be fatal.

Monday, September 8, 2014

This cartoon really impacted me
because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in
America.

This book was inspired by the
welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person
live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by
actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes
her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more
admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain
restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate
the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny
trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen
facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her
most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because
this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical
expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the
job).

This experiment was done in 1999
and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was
experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before
corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as
full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a
better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off
cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.

She also discusses the
psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and
lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are
hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their
disposal.

In the aftermath of the Great
Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to
imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get
a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day
allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Mark Fiore is one of my favorite editorial cartoonists,
creating short animated videos every week. This
week's cartoon suggests the US is "a split-personality superpower,
condemned to wander the earth for all eternity fighting our other selves."

A couple of Fiore’s examples: When ISIS overran the Iraqi
military positions a month or so ago, the Iraq soldiers ran away and abandoned their
equipment, including tanks. You can see the ISIS militants having some fun with
their new toys in the VICE
documentary on ISIS. Now when we bomb ISIS we're bombing our own military
equipment.

In the last couple of weeks Egypt
and the UAE have bombed Libya a few times, and even though they're our
"allies" and their troops were trained by the U.S. and use our
military equipment, they denied to the Obama Administration that they'd done
it.

A lot of good money to be made by supplying the armies of the world with the tools of their trade...

The split personality metaphor works in another way: most Americans believe our country is a positive force for good in the world. We vastly overestimate the amount of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. We complain about having to be the world's policeman. Yet we're blind to the fact that we are the world's biggest exporter of weapons which means a substantial portion of our economy depends upon continuing war and violence in the world. The U.S. is badly in need of therapy to face some hard truths about its personality.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Are animals conscious?
Consciousness has been called the “hard problem” of philosophy; scientists
still don’t have any idea what human consciousness is. But it seems that for
most people, consciousness is still on that ever-shrinking list of things that
separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom; only humans have
consciousness. But is that true, or is it just more evidence of human
arrogance?

Lately I have seen a number of
things that have made me question the presumption that animals aren’t
conscious. The first is my sweet cat, KittyCat. Sometime about six months ago she
and I got in the habit of brushing her every evening about 7:00. I am regularly
amazed at how she turns up in the living room every day about that hour. It’s
usually the time we are finishing dinner, so you could say she’s using the clue
of the sounds of dishes being washed, but there are many times when we haven’t
eaten and she still shows up. We joke about her Mickey-Mouse wristwatch, but
truly it amazes me how she is so aware.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Many Eastern spiritual
traditions teach the wisdom of being present in every moment of now. This
principle was brought to the attention of Westerners in the 1960s through Ram Dass’s classic Be Here Now, and more
recently with Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller The Power of Now.

Recently I was contemplating the
meaning of "present," and I realized it has three meanings: "here"
(when the teacher calls your name you reply, "present!"),
"now" (an event occurs in the present), and "gift" (“here’s
your birthday present!”).

What I like about this trinity
of meanings is that being present
means more than “being here now”; being
present also means embracing what is as a gift.

When I was in high school I used
to make a calendar in the last few months of school and took delight in
crossing off every day until the last day of school. One day I realized how
crazy this attitude was—I’m celebrating getting a day over with? As if a day is
something to endure? What is life except the collection of innumerable days
just like this one, filled with a mixture of positives and negatives?

A beloved cat, Fluffles, helped
me learn this lesson. At one point in my life she and I would wake up every
morning in bed together. Every day the first thing I would become aware of was
the sound of her purring, and it communicated to me, “I’m happy that we have
another day to live and to love each other.” Yes I finally realized, that’s the
way to live. Not seeing life as an endurance test but as a gift!

The gift of presence has another
meaning also. Werner Erhard (founder of est) once said, "The greatest gift
you can give another is just to be with them."

As I have learned to be more
present, I have seen how true Mr. Erhard’s insight is: when you are present
with another, they often open up like a flower. Presence is like a calming wave
flowing through you, and other people can relax in its wake.

Friday, August 8, 2014

In a nutshell: Living
With a Wild God is the story of a rational, scientific-minded atheist
wrestling with the meaning of a personal mystical experience.

Ms. Ehrenreich is an atheist, has been all of her life. And
she is from a lineage of atheists that goes back to her great-grandmother (the
great-grandma was Catholic and the priest wouldn’t show up when her father was
dying unless they paid him $25; a few years later she was dying in childbirth,
when the priest showed up, put a crucifix on her chest and started
administering the last rites she hurled the crucifix against the wall.)

But as
a young teen-ager Ms. Ehrenreich was obsessed with the quest to find the
“Truth”; in other words to find answers to such questions as why are we here, what is the point of life? At
the same time she started having experiences where her perception would
dissolve, like all the boundaries around separate objects disappeared. She had
trouble putting the experiences into words in the journal she kept at the time,
and the best word she could come up for it was “disassociation.”

Then one day when she was 17 she had a profound experience,
which, again, she struggles to express. Her best metaphor is of fire:

the
world flamed into life…There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by
totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I
poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All,’ as
promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living
substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for
the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire
really closely without becoming part of it.

Because she had no framework for this experience, in the
ensuing months she struggled to keep her equanimity. She worried she was
mentally ill. Soon she left for college and the existential crisis passed.

Her father was a scientist, and she assumed from an early
age she would become a scientist. She ended up getting a PhD in biochemistry,
although she has never worked in the field. Instead she became a political
activist and social scientist, writing such books as Nickel and Dimed about her attempts to live on minimum wage
(imagine, a social scientist who experiments on herself).

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

I became a fan of Sharon Draper
when I read her book Out of My Mindearlier
this year, but I didn’t know anything about her as a person (the copy of the
book didn’t have an author photo). Recently I wanted to refer to the book in a forum post and
googled her to check a fact. I went first to an interview where someone asked
why race hadn’t come up in the book. I thought that was an odd question, but it
made me realize that race had never been mentioned. Then I clicked on another
link and saw a photo of Ms. Draper and realized she is black. Then the question
made sense.

But why should the book have to
revolve around race just because she’s black? Ms. Draper was addressing an
issue that confronts people of all races—the prejudice faced by a young girl
with cerebral palsy—and giving the girl a racial identity would just have
clouded that message.

Knowing this about her has made
me even more of a fan. She is an example of the radical equality I dream of,
where we don’t have to pay attention anymore to details like race, gender, or
sexual orientation. Those things are immaterial; what matters is what kind of
person you are.

American culture has made great
strides in the last decade in recognizing the rights of LGBT people. But I
dream of a day when no one has to “declare” their sexual orientation. In other
words there is no “normal” sexuality that requires you to say “I’m not that,
I’m this.”

Years ago SouthPark had an excellent
episode about the end of racism. Chef, who is black, was angry about the
town’s flag, which depicted a black man being lynched and white people dancing
around the tree. The adults were confused about why Chef was angry—“this is our
tradition,” they said—and the children were too…for a different reason. Chef
realized that the kids didn’t see color—when one of them described the flag he said,
“it’s a person hung from a tree and other people are standing around.” Chef
realized his response had racism in it—it was all about color. The resolution was
the flag basically stayed the same—a black person hanging from a tree and
people all around—with one significant difference: the crowd is now
multicolored and includes a black person.

One day we will all realize that
everyone is radically equally human.

Update: my niece and I just read To Kill a Mockingbird, set in segregated Georgia in the 1930s. My niece thought that Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, and Atticus were probably going to get married. By way of explanation she said, "The kids loved her!" I could see her struggling to understand as I explained why that marriage would have been unthinkable at the time. It was great seeing that the explanation made no sense to her.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

At the beginning of July a man
posted a project on Kickstarter: Making Potato Salad. He asked for $10 for supplies, and since this was his first
potato salad, he said it might not be any good, but he’d send samples to anyone
who funded him for $3. This is what he’d do if you pledged $20:

Receive a potato-salad themed
haiku written by me, your name carved into a potato that will be used in the
potato salad, a signed jar of mayonnaise, the potato salad recipe, hang out in
the kitchen with me while I make the potato salad, choose a
potato-salad-appropriate ingredient to add to the potato salad, receive a bite
of the potato salad, a photo of me making the potato salad, a 'thank you'
posted to our website and I will say your name out loud while making the potato
salad.

Within a week he had over
$40,000 pledged.

I first heard about this from uber-liberal
cartoonist Ted Rall, who found it outrageous that such a frivolous “project”
could generate so much in donations. His cartoon, “Potato Salad Society,”
includes these comments:

Meanwhile, worthier Kickstarter
projects—and charities—go unfunded. It’s safe to assume that few of the potato
salad supporters would give anything to save refugees in South Sudan…Finding
donors online requires the deadpan, mildly amusing tone that has become the
official vibe of the Web.” Rall’s conclusion: “We.Are.Doomed (Internet-friendly
neo-Bob Newhart tone).

First off that is quite
condescending and presumptuous to assume these people wouldn’t give to
refugees, but this is in-your-face Ted Rall; he loves being confrontational.

But more importantly, I think
Rall and other critics are missing something important here. I think this
potato salad project could signal the future of how many of us earn a living.

I envision a future where some
people make their living online, with sponsors contributing small amounts a
month or year to support their creative output —a crowdsourced version of the
wealthy patronage system that supported great Renaissance artists like
Michelangelo. Instead of depending on one wealthy person, these people could
live off thousands or millions of tiny contributions.

It’s becoming common today to
see paypal “donate” buttons on websites. Ted Rall has one on his website, and I
have contributed as a way of showing my support for his work (perhaps he’s
bitter because he’s not generated the same level of support as the potato salad
maker).

We could support people because we
think his or her work is important, or because we want to be part of it. We
could show our appreciation for something that makes us laugh, or think, or cry,
by contributing a small sum. The Huffington Post interviewed
18 of the potato salad donors, and they said they had contributed because
they thought it was “funny,” “charming,” and “genuine.”

Through the wonder of the
worldwide reach of the Internet, those small sums could potentially add up to a
decent living.

There are predictions that we
are not far from a revolution in work, due to the roboticization of the
workplace. This will throw a large percentage of people out of work, and we’re
not talking about factory workers only, this includes doctors and lawyers (see my
blog post). If this is true we’re going to need to find entirely new ways
to earn a living. Supporting each other’s creative endeavors seems to me a very
positive solution.

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.